Teaching 3:Exercise of Meditation in Spiritual

CONTENTS

Teaching 1:Inner Life

Teaching 2:Prayer

Teaching 3:Exercise of Meditation in Spiritual

Teaching 4:Meditation

Teaching 5:Simple Prayer

Teaching 6: Discursive Prayer

Teaching 7:Passive Meditation

Teaching 8:Ascetic Deviations

Teaching 9:Sensible Spiritual States

Teaching 10: Dryness

Teaching 11: Idealization during Meditation

Teaching 12: To Love in Silence

Teaching 13: Creative Imagination

Teaching 14: Asceticism in Life

Teaching 15: Renunciation to the World

Teaching 16: The Idea of Renunciation

COURSE III: INNER LIFE

Teaching 1: Inner Life

Many times you hear you have to return to inner life. But, what is actually inner life?

Also you are told evil in man consists in a continuous outward switch; and if you looked for within, you would find solution to all your problems. Which is that search, and how to start it?

Many souls are eager for inner life; but they do not know what to do to reach it, and then when they look within, are disappointed and in the dark.

All can reach a full inner life, but there are souls and souls, states and states.

Some people believe inner life is to think much, to investigate problems, to return continuously to themselves. Others look for inner life by sustained efforts of will to achieve their purposes. It is good to meditate on needs of the soul, but this is not inner life. If inner life does not mean to think or self-analyze, you could believe inner life is a continuous practice of exercises of meditation or prayer. These are actions of the individual being that become helpful, but are not inner life.

Inner life is a vital, total attitude of the individual.

Mainly, inner life is to invert the usual movement of the soul; not an action led inwards, but an elevation of spiritual values over human values. When we speak here of valuation of the spiritual aspect, we do not mean a mental attitude, but a new sense given to the existence to place it in the frame of its transcendental terms.

By this, natural centers of concerns are naturally displaced toward a unique, divine object, and forces of the soul stop being dispersed with useless gestures and start focusing on a unique spiritual action.

So inner life is not only an active movement of the soul, but also an usual spiritual disposition transforming disconnected and disordered actions of man into true life, into spiritual life.

When you are told, you need to “return” to the inner life, your impression is that inner life is a good that you possessed some day and that now is not yours any more. If you are told that you must return, it is because your soul always was darkly and vaguely aware of possessing that good that you seek so painfully and that will give happiness. It is like a deep consciousness of being and like knowledge that any conquest will be only a rediscovery. Knowing this one is infusedly and unbreakably sure that will attain the goal and that the destiny will be achieved.

Neither faith in spiritual life nor acceptance of the idea that human values are vain and fleeting is enough to make spiritual life possible.

Doubtless a vast faith increases human chances; but one thing is a thought accepted by people and another thing altogether is the living reality of the soul. Life may be ruled by trends entirely opposite to those ideas that an individual feels that he has. The human tragedy is that he is something very different from what he believes that he is, and his thoughts are continuously weakened by his deeds and trends. So the main effort in spiritual life should be made to achieve unity between mind and mind, and between mind and heart.

So perfection in inner life is not active concentration, but soul expansion, simple act of the spirit.

Inner life is progressive and expansive self-consciousness. It is the new world that man has to discover and conquer. To it he needs to know his own means to achieve it.

First he must know what is good; later he has to live according to it when the end is eventually transformed into “the” good.

To live centered in oneself, not out of oneself or inside oneself. A thought personally turned upon the individual being moves him away from his divine center. Just Renunciation fixes the soul to an inner life that is pure and simple.

When the important thing is spirituality, the human aspect takes its corresponding place, and illusory life becomes life, inner life.

Only inner life gives experience of the Teaching and of the divine mysteries. All problems lose importance and only fundamental problems remain alive.

From a mystical viewpoint, the grade of inner life is given by the depth of abstraction acquired or also by the usual clarity of control and self-consciousness.

Teaching 2: Prayer

Prayer as a mystical-ascetic mean is excellent in spiritual life, but at the same time is full inner life and becomes divine life by permanent contact with the Divine Mother.

Prayer is life; so it is not easily understood. Every human understanding is mere understanding and cannot comprise vast inner states or living forces brought into play in the mystical asceticism of spiritual life.

But it is necessary clearly to knowboth technique and prayer states of the souls, and to understand the need of prayer as an ascetic mean to divine realization.

Prayer is supernatural life of the soul, and in this sense it cannot be said it is necessary. It is, but humanly it is necessary as a mean to attain that supernatural life.

The eternal presence in the soul of its divine vocation is a latent state of inner prayer. But for practical purposes, prayer is taken as conscious attempts of the individual being to update in him that divine presence. These exercises of prayers produce a direct effect on the soul and are like little consecutive shocks that are continuously transforming the soul. At the same time they bring about reactions and inner states forming sediment of spiritual power within the individual being.

Regardless exercises of prayer, there is a particular mode of the soul that can be called state of prayer. It is a simple act, regardless time and action, which fixes statically the individual being on a singular inner pointas fixed center of his existence. This state is achieved by the permanent offering of the soul by means of Renunciation.

Even though exercises in themselves can achieve noticeable conquests in the field of mental and supernatural possibilities, they are insufficient to introduce the soul into the mystery of divine states. Inner spiritual life is achieved not only by ascetic prayer but also by ascetic Renunciation. Only Renunciation transforms acts of prayer into a permanent state.

Prayer produces in the soul contingent effects and permanent effects.

Prayer gradually leads to a physical, mental, astral and psychical adjustment, to successive higher and higher states; purifies affections and mental mechanism; situates intellectual, rational and emotional values; gradually simplifies the soul complex; brings to consciousness obscure subconscious states; gives wealth of ancestral experience gathered by the unconscious of the race; produces capacity to live super conscious states; tunes the sensibility of the soul and gradually raises to a divine state, to the union with the Divine Mother.

Prayer synchronizes intrinsic and extrinsic values and supernatural and natural valuestransforming being into a harmonious, integral whole.

Prayer leaves in the soul a permanent feeling of peace and certainty, a consciousness of being, staying on the road, and knowing that one arrives to its end.

Prayer gives life to the soul, makes man be conscious of his true vocation and divine destiny, and creates potentials of human and supernatural forces which he needs.

Prayer gives a direct knowledge of divine verities, presenting them to the soul with no other intellectual mechanism at all.

Prayer grants the gift of knowing and the gift of teaching: the gift of penetrating into the divine mystery and into unfathomable depths of the human heart.

Prayer gives infinite patience and supernatural comprehension of human problems, and there you find the secret to be able to live a divine life in a world that is darker and darker by sorrow, ignorant passion and separateness.

Teaching 3: Exercise of Meditation in Spiritual Life

Several exercises of meditation taught in ascetic spiritual life acquire or lose importance according to the situation of the Son before this spiritual life.

The Son meditates regularly and methodically.

This continuity in a life devoted to realize the Renunciation necessarily produces the mystical union of the soul with the Divine Mother, wherever the Son is and whatever is the work that he has to fulfill.

This union takes place by means of successive simpler and simpler. So the soul naturally simplifies little by little its methods of prayer until they are reduced to similar contemplative states, althoughwith different particular hues.

Doubtless prayer alone does not give realization, and even the most active way or any other way cannot lead to the Substantial Union when contemplative mystic states are absent

Rational mind dissociates activity from inner contemplation because it only operates in one sense, but a realized soul does not lose its contact with God even amid the most hectic activity.

You cannot differentiate life in the world from life detached from the world, and even there are not two types of prayer, one for every state of life. Simply there are several ways to feel the Renunciation and the need of inner offering. The pitfall is not in major or minor difficulties that the one and the other offer to the system of life, but in the spiritual poverty of the souls.

Wherever you are and whatever you do, you need will to Renounce and to do it.

In a contemporary author’s view, a normal man is a God-Realized man. Those who did not achieve it suffer of some unbalance preventing them from an integral experience of the reality, so their vision of things and life is distorted.

Then we can say there is not a major or minor inclination to mystic life, but a major or minor intensity of real life, of total experience of the truth, and of its need.

Behind extreme human inclinations there is always an internal factor of unbalance producing them, and we can state that almost any individual tends to certain extreme end in his life and actions.

The Divine Realization is not the fruit of an extreme inclination to asceticism; if so, it would be false mysticism.

Substantial Union is perfect balance, contingent and transcendent situation; integral situation and integral action.

There are few expert souls on the paths of inner prayer and meditation because few souls deeply feel their vocation of Renunciation and achieve it, but these souls are those marking the way and teaching how to realize it.

This apprenticeship is difficult because demands more than inner adhesion and practice. Also a free mental attitude is necessary.

When you feel that you already know something, you close any possibility to new experiences. Only when you know and admit that your experience is not total or definitive, your field is free to get successive infinite experiences. But this must be something more than an understanding; it is integration to the experience in its character of non-totality.

Teaching 4: Meditation

First we should explain the meaning of meditation, exercises of meditation, prayer, orison and entreaty.

The exercise of meditation is not an entreaty or request for oneself and for another person; it is an exercise of the mind. One thing is to entreat and another thing altogether is to meditate.

Meditation is a state or disposition of the soul.

Meditation is stability in a state of consciousness, in contrast to the usual variability.

The exercise of meditation is the mean tending to achieve this state, to make it more and more permanent, and to attain the simple state by gradual simplification.

Prayers are a particular mode of the meditation exercise.

Man is a compound if emotions, thoughts, ideas and sensations.

You need varied exercises to effectively act on every aspect and achieve a unique, precise and integral end.

Prayers, entreaties, vocalized prayers, and both discursive and affective meditation act on the emotional plane.

Affective meditation also acts on the comprehensive and ideational plane by the force of feeling. It does not create or discover; it works.

Exercise inside exercise cannot solve a vital problem. Life is solved in life; a mental or emotional problem is only the reflection of a problem. Exercise only leads to the point that unleashes a vital definition. A mental schema is not a solution, is a schema.

He who did not solve his fundamental problem has problems; he who has solved his life has tasks.

Confusion between what is an exercise and what is a mystic state produces disorientation as to the practice of the exercise of meditation.

The exercise unleashes sensible forces that turned on the chosen ideal cause a sensation of a greater union with God. The very act of internally setting oneself in the presence of the Divine Mother is already a partial state of union. But since the exercise of meditation is also a mystic exercise, difficulties of the exercise are mistaken for inner problems disconnected from the exercise of meditation.

Of course, sensible states produced during the exercise never are true mystique, but in most cases they are paramount moments in the life of the souls that take them as guides who indicate their progress and spiritual level.

True meditation never discontinues, like life, what should be spiritual life. But meditation is mistaken for the exercise, and exercise certainly is discontinued forcefully. So you have two different and opposite states of consciousness: the first, in the circle of exercise of meditation, could be called consciousness of the soul; the second, when the exercise ends and ordinary daily life begins.

These circles collide and fight one other.

The power of the Great Current keeps this inner fight alive. The Son fightsnot against external factors but against himself. Here is the virtue of Cafh: to unleash the internal conflict, which the Son calls spiritual life, struggle, efforts and realization; it is force transmutation. Change gives a sensation of achievement.

Exercises that are taught, particularly the exercise of meditation, keeps this struggle alive and fruitful.

The Son’s technique consists in knowing and creating by himself those conscious and unconscious stimuli that sustain and accelerate the rhythm of his spiritual life.

Teaching 5: Simple Prayer

Despite good intentions, despite apparent efforts, certain souls complain because they cannotrealize the spiritual life. Everywhere one finds difficulties and obstacles. Everything becomes justifications to explain the stagnation. So we are often told that in the world there are many stumbling blocks to achieve a pure spiritual life and that although all Sons can attain the Renunciation, people who must live on the vale only find difficulties.

Really this is meaningless because the soul that lives an inner life and prays, cannot have difficulties wherever is is, or whatever does, or whoever is, but certainly, many times the Son, by virtue of numberless causes, permits to be trapped by needs of life and by excessive preoccupation for his material troubles, and this moves away from contemplation and divine things; then a lot of difficulties emerge.

It is impossible to be in peace with oneself if first we do not define our inner values. You can never find what you procrastinate or relegate, and spiritual vocation never must be displaced by other concerns or intentions.

Everything will be difficult as you make your vocation play on the pair of opposites of one thing or the other, of one desire or the other, of one need or the other. This should reveal a great inner instability that is true source of all the rest of conflicts or obstacles.

The spiritual vocation is the only real value of the individual being, and therefore can be neither impossible nor exclusive for very few people. But its achievement is only reserved to those who know how to live it as their only real value.

Only a clear and final definition of what the Son is seeking allows him traveling through the path toward the inner liberation without inner obstacles.

As a practice, the simple prayer is the best way to remain centered on the Unique Idea and transcend inner and outer difficulties.

It is to do everything with an intention previously established by a life of surrender; it is faith on the success and good result of the spiritual mission, although if apparently this is not so; and it is a state of deep and usual humility in face of every action to fulfill in life.

Teaching 6: Discursive Meditation

Discursive meditation should be based on faith in order to become effective.

You may ask if all other –affective and sensitive meditations–likewise should not be based on faith. If you take strictly the latter as a mental-affective mechanism in action, they require no particular faith of the individual. On the other hand, discursive meditation is a free talk of the soul with the Divine Mother, and only faith can give it a divine sense.